The Problem With TV Time Travel—And How Lost Can Fix It

The final season of Lost has a lot of explaining to do. What exactly is the smoke monster? Why does Richard never age? Who is this sneaky fellow pretending to be John Locke? And why is numerology so central to the plot?

But the biggest question of all might also be the hardest to answer: Whose explanation about the show's time travel is right—Jack Shepard's or John Locke's? On one side of this conflict is Jack, Lost's sometimes reluctant hero, a surgeon who was forced to accept the island's bizarre properties, but only as expansions of core scientific principles. In the other corner is John Locke, the sad-sack paraplegic turned tropical warrior, who believes everything that happens on the island is for a greater reason, not beholden to the laws of man.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

So far, the show has maintained a delicate balance in the metaphysical debate between Jack and Locke with a surprisingly consistent and theoretically plausible approach to time travel. The time travel on Lost
isn't necessarily good science, but it basically adheres to theoretical physics: All of the wormholes and temporal mayhem can be traced back to the "exotic particles" buried deep in the island. Bursts of electromagnetism can be used to detect and access the island. And even casual exposure to the exotic particles can be as serious as other brushes with radiation, causing unborn babies to die. It might be pseudoscience, but time travel on Lost
feels like the product of quantifiable, observable natural phenomena.

More From Popular Mechanics

TV vs. Time Travel

For a TV show, this adherence to science—or even its consistent internal logic—is a minor miracle. Television has a tradition of turning time travel into a script doctor's nightmare of lazy errors, blatant contradictions, or, maybe worst of all, pure magic. For years, Quantum Leap put on the trappings of science fiction, with talk of holograms and quantum mechanics and wacky explanations for why Sam had the strength and martial arts prowess of a strapping physicist, even while beamed into the body of a child or monkey. And, similar to Lost, the show hosted a running debate between faith and science—Sam suspected that he was blinking through time "for a reason," and even encountered an entity that he halfway believed was the devil. But there was his intrepid, atheist holographic buddy Al with his time-analyzing computer, Ziggy, arguing that it was all a big workplace accident, and Sam would pop back into his own body in due time. Then came the series finale, a mysterious episode that revealed that Sam was in control of his temporal leaps all along. And in the final scene of the show, Sam breaks all of the rules, returning to a previous leap without a host, without Al or Ziggy, to warn Al's wife not to remarry (Al was a prisoner of war at that point in history). Sam retroactively fixes Al's future, instantly transforming him from a womanizing mess into a contented family man. A title card reveals that Sam never made it back to his body.

For sci-fi fans, this sucked. In a single episode, Quantum Leap became pure fantasy, possibly even a religious fable about a man-turned-omnipotent-angel. But not all betrayals are so blatant. Star Trek
was constantly mucking around with time travel, often thanks to an omnipotent being called Q that would regularly drop in on the Enterprise like a particularly obnoxious neighbor. As sci-fi blog io9 pointed out, Star Trek regularly had its cake, ate it, and went back in time to have and eat it all over again. Sometimes traveling back in time would change history, sometimes history would aggressively repair itself, and sometimes smashing a time-traveling device would miraculously undo whatever timeline-meddling it enabled. And in the famously ridiculous finale of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Captain Picard's consciousness seems to be split across three points in his own lifetime, a phenomenon that threatens to wipe out a large chunk of the universe, for reasons that make no sense in any timeline.

There are also countless TV shows that present time travel as unadulterated, unapologetic magic, with cosmic beings empowering regular humans to head off tragedies or fix past mistakes. These shows don't bother with science-speak about tachyons, neutrinos or paradoxes—someone winks, wiggles their nose, or simply acts smug, and suddenly reality is bending to their will. These shows don't need to be internally consistent. They are faith-based universes, where omnipotent beings send humans to do their busywork, and, ultimately, anything can happen.

One of the only series that stuck to its guns, while also exploring the ramifications of doctoring your own timeline, was the short-livedTerminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (TSCC). While the Terminator trilogy (never mind that last one) presented time as a closed loop, where traveling backwards to edit the future simply established events to come, the TV show was less hopeful. Once time travel was established during the coming war with the machines, both Skynet and the human resistance began dumping troops throughout history. The result was a time war that put anything in Doctor Who to shame, with operatives burying weapons and robots in buildings decades before they would ever be used, and a late-series revelation that all of that meddling had created multiple versions of the future. In the show's final episode, the entire mythology of the franchise was shattered, as the would-be messiah John Connor, as a teen, jumps from the present into the future. Suddenly, no one in the resistance recognizes him. The sense of destiny—that sending back robots to kill him only created the resistance leader Connor would become—established in the movies was gone. Time travel was a harsh reality, and there was no sense of cosmic order stepping in to knit the past, present or future back together.

That's the problem with Locke's argument, and it's why Lost's final season is such a challenge. If time travel is a kind of natural resource, whose effects and potential exploitation is the source of the show's epic characters and winding storylines, that's the stuff of a science fiction classic. Characters like Jacob and the Man In Black might appear supernatural to the average person, but their abilities could all stem from their exposure to and knowledge of the island's exotic particles. In that version of the Lost mythology, what's happened on the island is weird, but it's still science. And yes, there's a difference between weird science and magic—the principles that drive the insane mechanics of a black hole might defy classical physics, but they're still governed by quantum physics.

If, however, what drives time travel and everything else in Lost are lots of cosmic forces with capital letters—Fate, Good, Evil—then we've all been taken for a ride. Every character's decision and every time-space disruption would just become part of the unknowable maneuverings of a grand, supernatural chess game. That's the great temptation with time travel, though; to treat it not as a theoretical product of natural properties and very rare and often unpredictable particles, but as a miracle. Or, more precisely, as a plot device. Lost has a rare opportunity to get TV time travel "right," in the sci-fi sense. Even Doctor Who regularly dispenses with any science or pseudoscience, and relies on omnipotent beings and a sense of serendipity (the Doctor never appears in Earth's timeline when the planet's fate isn't hanging in the balance) that's synonymous with Fate.Lost doesn't have to answer every question with hard-nosed quantum mechanics. It doesn't even have to determine whether Locke or Jack is wrong—they can both be right. Time travel can follow a set of consistent, physics-approved principles, while also generating high drama and a few freakishly powerful characters. If Lost's elaborate mythology can survive intact, and resist the temptations of magical cop-outs, it will set a new standard for time travel on TV.